More from FuturePlay Game Producer workshop

Image via Wikipediaa few notes from Day 2 of the workshop - we talked about testing, project management techniques, production techniques, localization, voice over and music, and relationships with external forces like marketing

big realization - preproduction is so much more important than I ever thought. Marketing needs to be on board that early. You have to plan for how you're going to localize your game that early. You ahve to plan what voices you'll need so you can get on their schedule for voice over recording sessions.

The producer doesn't have to be a serious gamer. They need to be detailed oriented, willing and able to keep track of what everyone is doing all the time. And be able to communicate it up the food chain to management and down the foodchain to team members.

Producers can have associate producers. Publisher might assign someone from their staff to be the publisher's producer to seemingly spy on you. But also to make sure the publisher's money being spent efficiently.

Localization becoming more important because games want to do what's called simship - ship to all countries the same day. Cuts down on game pirating. I think this might be a cool project to get folks from foreign language depts involved in games - have the junior or senior game folks localize into one language.

game folks don't seem to have much respect for marketing - marketing seen as a big time waster causing the game folks to stop their work and make a demo or a trailer for markeitng to send out to magazines or conferences. This would be a good way to get IMC involved in the game major - give the game folks experience working with markeitng in a positive way before the game folks go out to the real world

themes that keep coming up

• test test test
• communicate communicate communicate
• get buy in from the team
• need processes to track change requests, bugs, need for new resources
• have to educate team sometimes on importance/necessity of project management techniques